Eben Moglen's GPL3 Talk @ SERC

Eben Moglen was in Bangalore! He talked yesterday at St. Joseph's, and today at SERC! Obviously I couldn't miss this talk, from the legal brain behind the GPL. And I must add, I'm glad I didn't miss this talk. Prof. Moglen is a brilliant, fun speaker -- he spoke almost extempore for an hour, and did another half hour of questions, and spoke with fantastic precision and clarity. I guess that goes with his job (he's a Lawyer, a Professor and was once a Programmer). Lawyers and Programmers learn very early the importance of precision in speech, but not many Programmers end up giving speeches -- we may one day, though!

Prof. Moglen's talk was nicely structured. He dealt with the new language of the GPL3 first, and how it's probably the first time there's been a license that's independent of any legal language and therefore should function extremely well in any legal system. That's because it actually uses terms that have to be resolved at "run-time/in the court" ("late binding" -- my term), and should therefore work well anywhere in the world. It's a whole new model, and it seems the CC3 licenses will also adopt a similar approach. He then talked about the role that GPL2 played for users, businesses and the Free Software movement, and went on to elucidate what GPL3 had changed or modified in these contexts.

He then talked about the process itself, the task of creating a new license in a participatory process that would be acceptable to so many people and businesses without giving up on the principles of the Free Software Movement. There were gentle digs about debian-legal, lkml and the W3C patent policy list, and the flame wars he expected but thankfully never happened in the GPL3 process.

Lastly he talked about the "Free Republic". How the big picture is really about Freedom, and how the GPL3 is just a small, "primitive" step in that direction. Replacing Political Representation by Direct Participation struck a chord with me -- I've been thinking about how Student Councils are really unnecessary in a networked environment -- and it's clear that idea has a fantastic example: the GPL. The GPL is actually a very neat hack against Copyright Law, a "Proof of concept" and "Running code", as he called it. It'll be interesting to see the idea spread to the non-coding masses, which it should with the CC licenses (the "cultural cousins" of the GPL).

All in all, a fantastic talk! Thanks to the BLUG for bringing it to SERC.

P.S.: The GPL3 should be released July 1.